I had the opportunity today to fix what appeared to be a big, ugly, wasteful problem in a very simple way, and I have to say: There are few better feelings in my line of work.

In brief, I had a client whose Adwords data was not coming through into Analyics, leaving me and the PPC lead with no real information as to which ads were most effective. Never having encountered the issue before, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Most of the time, this data passthrough happens fairly automatically. I’m still not totally certain why it did not do so in this case.

Ultimately, what appeared to be a big nasty issue turned out to be a fairly simple process of following the (for once accurate and up to date) Google documentation on the issue, which explained the proper way to link the two accounts. Turns out this account had been set up with some old information. So what I thought was going to be a drawn out process of testing and troubleshooting turned out to be a fairly simple reset of some account linkages, and I’m about 90% certain that the issue is now resolved.

There are few better feelings in this gig than the discovery of a simple solution to a problem that had several other staffers all in a twist. And while it’s in many ways more satisfying to work through a complex solution to fix a problem, there’s definitely a lot to be said for a quick and easy fix that makes other staff members’ jobs much easier.

Oh, and I learned something. The opportunity to learn something new nearly every day is one of the things that keeps me satisfied in my job.